Appium Conference India 2019 Experience

In late October the year before, I saw a tweet from AppiumDevs that Appium Conference was coming to Bangalore. I booked the conference ticket and the flight within a few minutes. This note is the two conference days, and what I took out of them.

About the conference

Appium Conference, like Selenium Conference, is a community event. It had been running twice a year, organized by volunteers. The shape is three days: one hands-on workshop and two days of conference. The program is not only Appium, and not only test automation. A lot of it sits past any single library.

Day 1

Jonathan Lipps opened with “Appium: The Next Generation”: the roadmap, the philosophy, and how the mobile testing stack was growing in complexity and scale. The point I kept was that both open source and cloud services have a job in that stack. He closed with Star Wars, which the room enjoyed.

Angie Jones spoke on “Your Tests Lack Vision: Adding Eyes to Your Automation Framework”. The talk was visual testing for apps and sites, with live coding against Applitools Eyes and Appium.

Vishvnath Pratap and Lokesh Mittal gave a short talk, “Automated Solution for Non Functional Requirements (NFR) & Performance Metrics Of Mobile App”: capturing performance metrics while the app is still in development, with the architecture they used at their company.

Anand Bagmar spoke on “Testing & Release strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps”. The case was ViuClip, a region-based streaming service, and how to keep quality and time-to-market under heavy device fragmentation. I prefer this kind of case. It shows a problem that was actually worked, not a feature list.

Jonah Stiennon spoke on “Find Elements By Accessibility Id”: when an accessibility id is the locator you want on a native app, how it compares with other strategies, and how to start using it.

Anton Angelov spoke on “How to Test the Test Automation Framework”: building and keeping a framework, and testing the library so the people who depend on it are not the ones who find the breaks.

Pradeep Soundararajan, from Moolya, spoke on “Building Tools to Free up Exploratory Testers”. The argument was to spend less of the community’s attention on automation as an end, and more on tools that help a peer do better work, with a community around those tools.

The breaks, lunch, and dinner were where the rest of the day happened: people talking, and a lot of food.

Day 2

Jason Huggins opened with “Don’t Fear the Robot”: robots in mobile testing, and a setup you could build at home inside a normal budget. I left wanting to try one.

Justin Ison spoke on “Appium Native Application Crawler”: why he built a crawler, how he used it, and what it could become. The idea is the part I still like.

Diego spoke on “Building a Mobile Testing Infrastructure: What I Learned”. This was the dense one: an in-house mobile lab, the same job done with a cloud service, and the tradeoffs of each.

Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna, both Appium contributors, spoke on “Native mobile commands in Appium”. Some scenarios are awkward or impossible through WebDriver alone. Native mobile commands cover a set of those, and they showed them live.

The day ended with a Q&A with Appium panel members. The questions were about the project and about everything around it: code, tests, documentation, the conference, and who was on the panel. The energy held through the last session.

Who was there

About 350 people, which is a solid room for a conference this focused. Most were senior, with years in mobile development or testing, and they were there to compare notes.

I met people from the previous conference, colleagues from earlier ones, and a lot of new people. The conversations were work, food, the city, and the talks.

The speakers were easy to stop in the hall. Most of them were as interested in someone else’s work as in their own.

The event is run by volunteers. Naresh Jain and the ConfEngine team built the app and the site that made the day plannable: the schedule, and a way to find people.

Still learning

The keynotes and the hallway were enough to fill a follow-up. The original note said the next pass would be the talks on YouTube and the slides on the conference site. This page is the record of being in the room.